On the first day of the interviews in Boston, we were nervous, not certain Rudd would show up. We’d set up at the TV studios of public broadcaster WGBH. Cinematographer Louie Eroglu had created a small arena in a corner of the studio, with a dense stand of lights throwing long shadows across the concrete floor. He was using large sensor cameras that caused the background to fall away, focusing the viewers’ attention on the face.
Rudd arrived thirty minutes late, brisk and nervous. He was again accompanied by Jing, who took up a seat close to Deb Masters. The interview would be the first time Rudd spoke publicly about his removal from power. The joviality of the night before had disappeared. I had observed a wounded quality in Rudd, even when he was relaxed. I knew the word ‘wounded’ would make his enemies scoff but I could sense it, nonetheless.
At the beginning, I tried not to cut him off, feeling my way, trying to work out his attitude. Rudd wanted to control the flow of the interview. I let his answers go long, searching his face for the person I had seen in news stories in that first election year. To tell the story of Episode 1, we needed Rudd and Gillard to relive the time when there was warmth between them. In the archive of the Labor Party conference in 2007, Rudd draped his arm over Gillard’s shoulder while she patted his hand. In the interview, Rudd’s first observations about Gillard were stiff. He found his mojo talking about John Howard.
Rudd had achieved an impressive victory in 2006, seizing the leadership of the Labor Party, but the bigger challenge lay ahead: fighting a general election against Howard, the veteran Liberal Prime Minister.
Beneath Mr Howard’s respectability was one of the cleverest, wiliest and at times nastiest political operators you could find. He’d been enormously successful in Australian politics and seen off so many of my predecessors, so I had no view at all that we would necessarily win in the election. John Howard has this image well cultivated, of the trustworthy conservative politician …
Rudd leant forward and snapped his fingers for emphasis.
On the other hand, he would happily snap your carotid artery.
Lachlan Harris remembered watching the new leader define his position against Howard.
Rudd’s core insight was that, forget about being the destroyer of Howard, he had to be the son of Howard. You saw it in the tone he set in that very first press conference. If you have to understand 2007 in one simple sentence, it’s that we were organising a transition for the Liberal Party that they should have organised for themselves.
Advertising executive Neil Lawrence led Labor’s creative team.
We’d been doing some research and someone in a research group said that John Howard’s a very clever politician and that stuck in my mind. So what I said to Rudd was, ‘I’d just call John Howard a very clever politician’. It was the first time I’d met him and the next morning on radio I heard him calling John Howard a very clever politician. [I saw] what a quick read Kevin Rudd was.
Rudd credited himself with the phrase.
I began using the phrase ‘Mr Howard is a clever politician’. I used it once or twice and I think some of the research team threw that into analysis and found that it resonated a lot. But I used it quite deliberately myself up-front and before anyone bothered to test it with groups, because that’s how I looked at him.
For Episode 1, dozens of hours of campaign footage were assembled into a three-minute sequence, cut dynamically by editor Lile Judickas to a Paul Kelly song—while it captured the energy of the campaign, we hoped no-one would notice the title of the track: Dumb Things. Television loves contrast. The optimism and heady rush of those months, the enjoyment visible in Rudd and Gillard, provided the counterpoint we needed for the darker episodes to come.
Gillard complimented Rudd on his skills as a campaigner.
Kevin’s agility, his analysis of the media cycle, the ability to produce content which would get the press pack running in one direction to present the images that TV cameras would love, Kevin was masterful at that, and by saying that I don’t want to imply it’s all contentless. The essence of a political party campaign is that you’ve got the themes, you’ve got the policy content, but you present those to people in a way that’s going to come through the media and he was incredibly, fantastically good at that.
One of the defining features of the campaign was its discipline. ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore recalled the atmosphere through 2007.
It was fantastic, collegiate [sic] … Once we got a sniff and we thought we were going to win, it was amazing how everyone came together. I was aware of how the party had been divided, but in that 2007 year it wasn’t unusual to sit in a room with Rudd, Gillard, Swan, everyone working really well together, everyone laughing together, everyone having a really good time.
Wayne Swan described the conscious decision he made after the change of leader from Kim Beazley to Rudd.
Once the leadership challenge was over, my responsibility was to work as effectively with Kevin and the team as I possibly could and that’s what I did.
Swan remembered driving with Rudd in rural Queensland, where the two had gone to the same school.
My real memory of the lead-up to that campaign was being with Kevin and working closely with him on putting together some of his own narrative about where he came from and what he wanted for the country, and particularly the emphasis on education. And I remember being with him up the Sunshine Coast … and driving around the cane fields chewing the fat about what had actually happened at school.
Swan isn’t given to sentimentality. It seemed a pragmatic détente.
SF: Did you recover in that drive around the cane fields some of the friendship?
WS: Well, my view was I wasn’t going to concentrate on the negatives. I was going to do my best to work with Kevin. I think I did … but from my point of view the relationship that we’d had … from 1988–89 onwards through the nineties was never there again.
According to Jim Chalmers, Swan’s deputy chief of staff, the relationship between Rudd and Swan in 2007 was the key to Labor’s success.
The way that they work[ed] together, both of them deserve enormous credit for the way they did this. They did an extraordinary thing for the Labor Party in that period by burying the hatchet, and they set an example, those two guys, that everyone else followed.
Kim Beazley had urged his staff to work for the new leader. John O’Mahony stayed on as one of Rudd’s advisers. He gave a research interview.
He was the prime minister in waiting. He was able to stand near state Labor premiers and he was able to hold these summits. He was doing a different thing.
At Labor’s National Climate Change Summit, Rudd told his audience: ‘Climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation’. According to Neil Lawrence, after industrial relations, climate change was the key issue of the 2007 campaign.
WorkChoices as a dividing line was the major one in that campaign but I think underneath that was climate change … What made it not boutique at the time was we were in the middle of a really serious drought and this was affecting people’s livelihoods. People could imagine it, seeing the dams emptying, so it had great saliency and power.
The ACTU’s campaign against the Coalition’s industrial relations reforms had been running for two years and the ALP used it to promote their own industrial relations platform. It was Julia Gillard’s job to negotiate the policy that Labor would take into government. Greg Combet, who headed the ACTU before making the move into federal politics, admired Gillard’s work.
Julia negotiated that personally and that’s the first time I’d really had detailed policy engagement with her and I respected her very much. It’s a rather intricate area of law and she got right across it and did a fantastic job with it.
Greg Combet said it gave Gillard long-term credit with the union movement.
It was very important for years to come. It was a factor in her survival as Prime Minister and leader of the Labor Party even when the polls were so dire and o
ur political circumstances were so bad. The fact is that the union movement had a lot of confidence in her because of the work that she had done over a long period, but that was a particularly important period before the 2007 election.
The polls across 2007 reflected the voters’ fascination with the new Opposition Leader. Lachlan Harris explained the different ways people responded to Rudd.
What they like about him is he’s really, really smart, trying to be really, really cool, and he fails at it miserably. A lot of people who really loved Rudd, who still do, that’s what they see. They see this kid from Nambour who’s got all the intelligence but he wants to be the cool kid and he fails. Who can’t relate to that? The people who like Rudd, they get that. The people who don’t, see it as duplicitness [sic].
Voters still expressed concerns about Labor’s ability to manage the country’s finances. To win their trust, in an early advertisement, Rudd defined himself as an economic conservative, but there had never been a change of government when the economy was doing so well.
In September, Howard and his senior ministers pushed Rudd to confirm who would be Treasurer if Labor won office. Howard argued that not knowing who would hold the key economic positions in a Rudd government was causing economic instability. Costello said the public wasn’t sure about Swan. Tony Abbott claimed Rudd and Gillard had an agreement to make her Treasurer.
Gillard acknowledged she did have an eye on the key portfolio.
I had harboured ideas about being Treasurer and there was a particular point in the campaign, a Bulletin piece, speculating that I would be Treasurer. And Kevin rightly identified that this would be a very major campaign distraction and so he took the opportunity to say, ‘No, Julia will do the employment workplace relations bit, Lindsay will be Finance Minister, Wayne will be Treasurer’, and I wasn’t unhappy about that.
With a flash of the animosity to come, Rudd explained the decision.
A mistake that I made was not putting Lindsay Tanner in as Treasurer … in trying to heal some of the wounds from the leadership challenge against Kim Beazley, the advice I got … was to keep Wayne Swan in that position … Lindsay’s an extraordinarily bright bloke and Wayne was never quite up to the task.
24 November 2007: election night. In a room at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, three of the Opposition Leader’s closest advisers monitored the results as they rolled in, booth by booth, electorate by electorate. Kevin Rudd was in another room with his family.
There was a room where Thérèse and I and the three kids were … And maybe I’m a bit superstitious about these things but I actually refused to be there while the detailed count comes in.
Around 9.30 p.m., with Labor eight seats ahead, the advisers told Rudd he would be the country’s next Prime Minister.
It was Queensland that had come home in the end and made that victory possible. And [Senator John] Faulkner said, ‘Comrade, I think we’re just there’, at which point within a nanosecond John Howard was on the telephone: ‘Congratulations Kevin on winning a fine victory on behalf of the Australian Labor Party’. And I said, ‘Well, thank you Prime Minister’.
Labor won a majority of eighteen seats. Jim Chalmers, who was part of Channel Nine’s election night coverage, watched the seats fall to the ALP in Rudd’s home state.
He didn’t just sneak into government. He stormed to government.
Julia Gillard was on the ABC’s election night panel hosted by Kerry O’Brien, in the tally room in Canberra. As Kevin Rudd walked onto the stage at Suncorp to deliver his victory speech, the cameras in Canberra followed Gillard’s reactions, capturing one of the most potent moments of the series.
I want to thank my deputy Julia Gillard. She has been fantastic as the Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party. She’ll be fantastic as the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.
Gillard’s eyes blinked with tears, she mouthed her gratitude to Rudd. There is no doubting the strength of feeling in that moment. Gillard then spoke to O’Brien.
Kevin has just done a remarkable job in less than twelve months and a remarkable job during the campaign. He’s just amazing and … [is] in touch with the Australian community. You couldn’t possibly ask for better.
We replayed the intercut between Rudd and Gillard in the concluding moments of The Killing Season, with British MP Alan Milburn’s damning commentary on how Labor squandered the promise of that night. It is almost impossible to imagine at that moment their triumph could dissolve so completely, so quickly.
Rudd’s victory speech contained its moment of unforgettable bathos as the new Prime Minister exhorted the chanting, triumphant Labor supporters to get back to work after a cup of tea and a biscuit. I asked Rudd if he had copied his former boss, Wayne Goss, who, after routing demagogue Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1989 Queensland election, told his supporters to take a cold shower.
It’s true. Because we’d been out of office for thirty-two years in Queensland and what you’re dealing with is massive expectations. I’d already been a bit worried about the state of the global economy by that stage because the early evidence of the subprime crisis was there bubbling in the American media, so I’ve got that slightly in the back of my mind. So it was, yes, a cup of tea, Iced VoVo, quick lie-down.
Before concluding his speech, Rudd singled out three people from the campaign: veteran campaigner John Faulkner, national ALP secretary Tim Gartrell, and former New South Wales secretary and Senator-elect Mark Arbib, whom Rudd called ‘my great friend’.
Political friendships are not like normal friendships, but Mark Arbib had been central to Rudd’s success in seizing the party leadership, switching the crucial support of Labor’s New South Wales branch away from Kim Beazley.
KR: From the beginning I listened to Mark Arbib’s advice.
SF: Did you trust him then?
KR: Trust is different, a difficult question. I always worried about him and others on this question. When people become super-acute at, let’s call it machine politics, I always wonder whether they’ve lost their soul or are losing their soul on the way through.
Rudd’s rumination on Arbib’s soul was the first example of him defining his enemies in moral rather than political terms. Whether Rudd really believed this about Arbib at the time of Labor’s victory is hard to know.
Meanwhile, a gallery of photographs was slowly assembled on the back wall of The Killing Season office. Half the wall was dominated by a portrait of Rudd, the other half by an imperious image of Gillard, their supporters arrayed beneath them. A black-and-white photograph of Mark Arbib, his face half in shadow, an image of political intrigue from Renaissance Italy, sat at the top of the ‘undecideds’ column.
CHAPTER 3
THE PRECIPICE
I think it is extremely likely that he [Rudd] was better prepared for any of this stuff than any political leader anywhere else in the world.
Ken Henry
THERE WERE THIRTY-EIGHT new MPs in the victorious Labor Caucus in 2007. Watching the news footage of Kevin Rudd walking into the Caucus room in Parliament House, to a standing ovation from his colleagues, it’s hard to resist the notion that the seeds of his demise were already sown. But that is a trick of perspective. In The Killing Season, we had to make the audience forget they already knew the ending.
Among those greeting Rudd and embracing Julia Gillard that day were Labor’s high-profile recruits: former ABC broadcaster Maxine McKew and union leaders Greg Combet and Bill Shorten. Combet said he wasn’t caught up in the enthusiasm.
I was very respectful of him for the energy that he put into campaigning and winning, but I was actually quite apprehensive. I thought, ‘How’s this going to work out?’
The Caucus would also include a group of new Labor senators when the Senate convened the following July. Among them were factional operatives and union leaders: Mark Arbib from New South Wales, David Feeney from Victoria and Don Farrell from South Australia. The archive footage of their first day shows them being guided around the Senat
e, looking awkward like new boys at boarding school. Two years later, along with another new boy, Bill Shorten, they would remove the Australian Prime Minister from office.
Arbib and Feeney had both supported Rudd for the leadership; Farrell had been implacably opposed. A former union leader, Farrell wielded power over the South Australian Right. He was also one of the first interviews of the series. In a small ABC studio in Adelaide, I was struck by his nervousness and his dislike of Rudd, expressed in a halting voice that almost masked the intensity of his feeling.
He certainly had some reservations about the role of the union movement in his government, and there was a vindictiveness about him which I think ultimately the Australian public came to see and came to reject about him.
When Farrell left Parliament in 2013, he said in his valedictory speech that ‘the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of crisis’. I asked him if he meant the Labor Party under Kevin Rudd.
That’s exactly why I said that … His managerial style was completely unacceptable, the way he treated his colleagues was completely unacceptable, and the way he managed his office was completely unacceptable. He simply didn’t understand what the role of prime minister involved.
Coming into office, Kevin Rudd was determined to end the influence of the factions over Cabinet positions. Confirming his economic team the previous September, he’d announced he would choose the ministry himself, and his choices would be based on merit.
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